Friday, May 18, 2012

Think of babies with me for a while. Think of human babies that you have known. Think of animal babies, puppies, kittens, baby birds, farm animal babies, going to the pet store. Think of baby fish of all kinds. Even think of baby plants, shoots coming out of the ground, sprouts emerging.

Let’s make two categories: “cute” and “ugly”. Or make a long line with “really cute” on the left end and “really ugly” on the right end. Now imagine putting all the babies one by one somewhere on the scale. What would it look like?

I’m going to take an educated guess and say that a very huge percentage of the babies are on the left end over by “really cute” or “mostly cute”.

Most puppies and kittens have got to be on the “cute” end. Don’t you have a calendar somewhere in your house with pictures of kittens or puppies? Do you remember the last time you went to the zoo? The biggest attraction was always the baby animals. Even baby hippos are cute. Was there any babies at the zoo for the “ugly” category? Can’t remember any.

Go through “Mammals” in the encyclopedia and check out all their babies. Any ugly there?

Human babies certainly are “cute”. They stay that way for years, maybe up to 5 or 6. There is a daycare at the building where I work and all the babies are cute. Maybe a couple get sort of close to the mid-point between “really cute” and “really ugly” on the spectrum, but definitely I’d still put them on the cute side. That’s just on physical appearance. If you add in their little personalities…definitely, definitely cute. If you ask their mother’s opinion, would you ever get “ugly”?

Baby birds almost all follow this pattern of cuteness. I say “almost” because a few might be tending over into the ugly area. Definitely the gigantic majority of baby birds are cute, for sure.

My wife loves gardening and yard work. Baby plants, flowers just coming up, even new grass sprouting are reasons for joy and excitement. If pressed to admit it, I’d have to say that those baby plants are actually pretty cute.

I’ve left insects for last because I’m a little conflicted where to put them on the scale. Probably, I’d have to get very close to, if not touching, “really ugly” when I’m thinking of baby flies (i.e. maggots). Can’t think of too many baby insects that I could put on the cute side. What about you? So I don’t mind if the ugly bugs get eaten by birds and mammals. (Maybe bugs were created ugly so we’d avoid attachments to them.)

So all in all, what percentage of the above creatures would be on the cute side? I’d go with about 98% myself when I look at the world. What about you?

If humans and animals are all the result of random accident, why are we all so darn cute? It makes no sense. Natural selection or survival of the fittest have no connection with cuteness. Ugly can survive and prosper. Do animal parents kick out the ugly ones and only keep the cute ones? Do animal parents have any idea that we humans look upon their offspring and say, “Oh, he’s so cute!”

Can we all agree that only humans see “cuteness”? It gives us joy. It also motivates us to act to share our feeling of joy with others.

Human parents expend great time and effort to give joy to their children. Isn’t that the whole point behind toy stores and going to the zoo, or buying them a pet?

The cuteness that I see everywhere in the world is not an accident. It’s a deliberate effort on the part of my “original” parent, God, to give joy to me, individually, as well as everyone else collectively. We are God’s children.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Have you noticed that most things in life that you buy will
come with an instruction booklet?

All around you there are signs and directions telling you
how to do things in the right order or the right way.

Obviously, to be successful at many, many things, you will
have to do them in a particular sequence or you get poor results or nothing at
all.

Simple machines don’t require a lot of instructions.
However, as the machines get more and more complicated, the instructions become
more and more complicated as well. At a certain point, you are not allowed to
do certain things unless you are trained and certified. Take for example brain
surgery or piloting an airplane.

In order to assemble something correctly, it takes intelligence.
You can give a monkey all the pieces to build a Lego submarine, but he’s not going
to accidentally build it in your lifetime and I’ll take odds on eternity. And monkeys
are among the smartest of animals.

To correctly assemble something, you have to not only put
the pieces in the right PLACE, but you also have to place them in the right
ORDER. If you don’t get the position and the sequence correct, then the
construction will fail.

Imagine the blueprints for building the Empire State
Building. First you have to dig a huge hole in the ground and then each step of
the way up you would need directions how to lay in all the water pipes, the
electricity wires, the plumbing, the air ducts, the heating ducts, on and on.

A human being is sort
of similar to a building. We have nerves (like electrical wires), lungs and
blood for moving air, water, food, and waste; heating and air conditioning
systems. If you were to try to create the “blueprints” for a human body, do you
think it would be more or less complicated than the blueprints for the Empire State
Building? Absolutely, the human body is 100’s if not 1000’s of times more
complicated than a building. The human body changes and grows. It replaces
itself cell by cell. It moves around.

The human body is actually “assembled”. I’m sure you have
seen books or videos of fertilization and growth of an embryo. That’s a clear
pattern of assembly going on piece by piece and in a certain planned sequence.

Was there an intelligence that put that all together? It’s
incomprehensible how it could have happened without intelligence.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Let's imagine that you are walking through the woods in a very secluded area. As you are walking, you see something on the path in front of you. When you get up close, it turns out to be three sticks that look like this.

What goes through your mind? How did those sticks appear like that?

Please give me a number on a scale from 0 to 100. Closer to zero means that the sticks happened to become like that totally at random with no interference from any unusual force. There is zero significance or meaning to the pattern.

A number closer to 100 would mean that you are more and more certain that some intelligent being arranged the sticks in exactly that pattern with some specific purpose in mind. The intention of the intelligent being is to send a message which has meaning and possibly value to an observer.

There is no right or wrong answer. This is just a line of reasoning.

My guess is that most people would give a number in the high 90's, although I haven't yet done the experiment. If you would care to leave a comment at the bottom, I'd be curious what you think.

OK, next step. Let's go a little further down the path. This time you encounter four sticks instead of three sticks. Look at the two pictures of 4 sticks that follow and think again of a number between 0 and 100.

Did your number go higher or lower? I'm pretty confident when I say that I think your number would go higher. It's getting less and less likely that this was an accident and more and more likely that the arrangement was done by some intelligent being.

One more picture and then my conclusion. Imagine again you are walking in the woods and encounter 5 sticks that look like this.

What number between 0 and 100 would describe whether this is random or put there by an intelligent being.

I don't know what number you are at right now, but if your number keeps going up, there will be some point at which it will get infinitesimally close to 100 as I keep adding more and more sticks.

What about 6 sticks, 7 sticks, ...100 sticks, ...1000 sticks in an arrangement that looks ordered?

I haven't even gotten started. I can go all the way up to 3 billion sticks. Take a look at this picture of "sticks":

Here's a quote from Wikipedia:

"The human (Homo sapiens) genome is stored on 23 chromosome pairs and in the small mitochondrial DNA. Twenty-two of the 23 chromosomes belong to autosomal chromosome pairs, while the remaining pair is sex determinative. The haploid human genome (ex. sperm or ova) occupies a total of just over three billion DNA base pairs.

Now imagine that you are walking with a friend in the woods and you come upon 3 sticks, then a little while later 4, then a little further on 5 sticks, on and on, ... 100 sticks arranged as I have described. Every time you come to a new set of sticks, your friend denies that any intelligent being could possibly have left this trail. Neither of you can see any intelligent being anywhere around can you?

What do you do? Do you laugh at the foolishness of your friend? Or do you cry for him because he is so lost from his senses for some reason.

3 billion "sticks" all lined up and organized ... there must be a God.

PS: Here's another ordered pattern that I love, but it's not sticks, it's "rocks".

Friday, May 4, 2012

You have probably heard the expression "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". That's generally true, but when it comes to flowers, it's different.

Let's think about ugly flowers. Stop a minute and imagine some of all the different kinds of flowers you have seen. How many would you say are ugly? Out of say 100 different flowers, how many would you say are ugly? 1, maybe 2, maybe even 0.

I tried to find out how many different kinds of flowers there are. But nobody really knows. This comes from ProFlowers.com:

"Our planet supports more than a thousand species of flowers. How many different types of flowers actually exist is still not known because they are so diverse."

Www.ChaCha.com says this:

"The total number of described flower species exceeds 230,000, and many tropical species are as yet unnamed."

Www.Flowers-cs.com says this:

"According to the scientists opinion there are more than 270,000 types of flowers. And each flower in his own way is beautiful and unusual and brings a part of pleasure into your life in order to make it happier."

Here are some sample pictures of flowers. You don't have enough time in your day to look at all the pictures you can find on the Internet:

Of all the flowers you have ever seen in your life, do you remember ANY as being ugly? Probably you might rate some of them as just plain and ordinary, but ugly would be extremely rare. Even the lowly dandelion, hated by many, was beautiful to you when you were a child.

And even those flowers that seem so plain to you, I bet you could find some person that says that exact one is their favorite.

If evolution were true, what are the odds by random chance that out of 270,000 different types of flowers, there are no ugly flowers? The odds must be staggeringly astronomical.

Now there are certainly many ugly bugs. There are some pretty ugly animals and fish too. But there are no ugly flowers.

When someone gives you flowers, what is the first emotion that comes to you? The flowers symbolize that they are giving you affection...they like you. Children will do it without being taught.

Imagine that there is a person that makes up 270,000 bouquets of flowers, one for each type, and gives them all to you. What would that feel like? What do you imagine that person would be trying to express to you?

Duh. He/She would be expressing the most amazing, enormous, overwhelming love for you.

For those of us who know God, behind every single one of those flowers is the love God has for me and for you. His love for us motivated the creation of those flowers.

That's why there are no ugly flowers. They are gifts from a loving God.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

When people see in their minds a chart of evolution, typically it looks like this:

This shows man evolving from an ape-like creature to a man. However, one extremely important and totally essential part is left out of this picture.

At every single step of the evolutionary process, there must have been a female developing exactly simultaneously the same genetic advancements along with the male.

If there were to be an "evolution" in the male body, for example, thumbs, but no simultaneous and corresponding evolution of thumbs in the female body, then thumbs would not likely propagate to the next generation. If it did, would all of the children necessarily have thumbs, or just some of them? Why wouldn't some have thumbs and some not have them?

Since all of the people in the world have thumbs, then we have to assume that we all descended from that one man and one woman who had thumbs.

Also, why wouldn't there be people around today without thumbs? If some of my ancestors had no thumbs and some of my wife's ancestors had no thumbs, wouldn't there be odds that some of my children would have no thumbs.

(Note: This scenario would also have to hold true for animals and fish or any species with males and females .)

As an even more complicated example, when the male develops a penis, the female must necessarily have to develop a vagina. Otherwise, what advantage is the penis.

If you study the female human reproductive cycle, there are many changes taking place throughout the month. For example, her vagina is normally toxic for sperm. Only during a few days each month does that change and her vagina actually becomes very hospitable to sperm and a mucous is created with fibers that help the sperm along their way to fertilize the egg. A phenomenal development that must have occurred at the time that a man got a penis.

And that's not all. Even if a male body develops a change and a female body develops a corresponding change, they still have to meet each other and mate successfully.

In other words, they have to live in close proximity to each other. They both have to be of child-bearing age. They have to mate. That mating has to produce a male child or a female child that inherits the new advanced trait. Then when that child grows up he or she must also find a mate with the same advanced trait to mate with successfully.

Are you thinking about the odds of all this happening?

I suppose you could assume that the new advanced trait is dominant. Then if any one individual has the mutation, then all of his/her offspring would have it. But isn't that a faith based assertion.

You could also hold onto faith in randomness and believe in very tiny changes taking place over millions of years. But you still have a theory based on faith and not scientific proof. That's not any better "proof" than my proof. And mine is far more elegant. Somehow I'm not able to imagine that such a method produces a viable penis and vagina through tiny incremental changes.

Evolution theory has to postulate that any advancement somehow spreads throughout the entire human population of all males and females. In other words, everyone of us had an ancester that had the trait. Either we all descended from an original male and female that had the trait or else all those born without the new trait totally died out and never reproduced.

When the odds of an event A happening are 10% and the odds of a second event B happening are 10%, then what are the odds that both A and B happen? This is calculated by multiplying the odds together. In this case, the odds of both A and B happening are 1%.

Even being extremely generous, I can't imagine the odds of some of the circumstances described above being anywhere in the neighborhood of 10%.

To believe that the above process happened at random without an intelligent creator invisibly guiding the process requires a huge amount of faith, faith in randomness and chaos to produce order and beauty. That's more faith than most religious people have.

About Me

Welcome to 101 Proofs For God for the "common man" This Blog was inspired by a prayer where I asked God how I could help Him and experienced a deeply lonely heart for His children. Hopefully my inspirations might tweak your thinking about the things all around you in this world.
Each proof should be just short enough for a 1 to 2 minute read.
May God bless you immensely and may you draw closer to Him every day. - Jim Stephens